


Release Me

by hotlegfryegg



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: I just wanted to be the first Sigma smut on AO3 pog, Masturbation, Quantum horseshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 13:57:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19947280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotlegfryegg/pseuds/hotlegfryegg
Summary: If you secrete fluid in one dimension, does it exist in the other?





	1. Containment

**Author's Note:**

> Sfw first, nsfw later.

Siebren, from what he could ascertain, was trapped.

Trapped in white walls and white lights and white floors and white coats and needles. Trapped by the ticking clock and the song ~~song song **song SONG SONG**~~. In one breath he felt hands and heard voices and in the next he was free floating, back in space, if he looked out the window behind him perhaps he could see South America from here but right now he was trapped by the glow in front of him and then ALL AT ONCE THERE WAS PRESSURE, PULL, **THE WEIGHT OF THE ENTIRE WORLD STRAINING AGAINST HIS _HARNESS_** and he hated it _so damn much_ ~~LET ME **GO**~~

and then it was back to the clock in the corner above the door _~~and the piano~~_.

His head hurt. Everything hurt? Maybe. Siebren couldn't really tell anymore. From heartbeat to heartbeat different parts of him phased _in and out and in and out_ to the beat of that inescapable melody. There was no telling how much time was passing (had he broken through a temporal rift as well? Was that possible?). Consciousness came and went, chorus and refrain. He grasped wildly at the hands that poked and prodded him, he cried from time to time and received no comfort. Was anyone even there? He felt himself sobbing, weeping like a babe as his wrists became raw and bloody from the cuffs he'd been strapped into. The catheter hurt, the IV hurt, his poor brain pounded in his head ~~**RELEASE ME**~~ and the sheer notion that he would never be able to finish his work hurt more than any of it. It's like he wasn't even a person anymore.

Perhaps he could science his way out of it. He had to try. What else could he do? Trapped in linoleum-lined halls and strapped to a gurney or foisted into a padded room, it's not like he had a lot of options ~~please, please _god let me out_~~ and he knew it was proven that the brain atrophies without human interaction or stimulation. Siebren had tried begging the hands would strap him down to _talk to me, tell me anything, where am I, who keeps playing the piano?_ but they never answered. Whenever they spoke, the words that hit his ears distorted along with him. Perhaps they were speaking another language?

Who was playing that DAMNED piano?

Whenever he was feeling particularly lucid and could focus for more than two minutes, he tried to recount any details or facts about his current condition and failed--despite his best efforts to accrue new data, his thoughts would rattle out of his head as it split between dimensions. It made sense to at least try and record it, did it not? It wasn't unusual for scientists to become their own subjects (although perhaps it was for a quantum physicist), and if anyone else knew anything, they certainly weren't telling him. The rational man in him would have loved to write down his thoughts to come back to between... _episodes_... but his begging for a pen and paper went just as unrewarded as his cries for help. So he tried to carve them into the padded walls after he tore his fingernail to the quick, but was quickly sedated and put through what he would later recall as the most violent grooming he had ever been given. Having lost that option, he tried to rip out **~~RELEASE ME, CAN'T YOU HEAR THE SONG~~** one of his own teeth, but was met with the same result and won himself a straightjacket for the day. Despairing and out of options, he started beating his head against the cell window.

After three rounds of beating his head and getting hit with the horse tranquilizer, his prizes were: a black eye, an even worse headache, and a lovely new orange jumpsuit.

~~_wait how did his clothing stay on when he couldn't keep his body_~~

In that moment, Siebren realized that they stopped keeping him exclusively secured to the gurney. How long ago had the tests slowed to the occasional drawn blood and electric shock? When did the electrodes recording his vitals become attached to his temple and chest? How long had he been in this room? His right hand started to blur and he clutched it to his chest, hyperventilating. Tears stung at his eyes one moment and were gone the next but his cheeks were dry. That was evidence, that had to be evidence, **WHAT IS THAT MELODY** and there had to be a scientific explanation for this phenomena. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. He had answers, he _had to_ have answers. If only anyone would let him write. If only anyone would let him go.

Curled up against the corner of the padded cell, he pressed his back into the wall in a bid for some security, some comfort, something, _anything_. Still clutching his hand and feeling his bare left foot start to phaze, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath in through his nose. If he listened closely, he would hear the screams of his captors and the gunshots of his rescuers.

_If only he could hear them over the piano._


	2. Convergence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Better out than in.

It had been... perhaps two months, since Siebren was freed.

Talon, the terrorist organization, had stolen him from what he was later told was a facility about 3 miles underneath Moscow. It had been nearly 8 years since his experiment on the ISS3. None of his coworkers knew he was alive after he was evacuated. Nobody knew. Dr. Siebren de Kuiper, Danish hero and father of modern gravitational technology, was dead to the world. Evidently he even had a statue in Oasis on the front steps of the physics campus.

He found himself not particularly inclined to care about any of it. ~~i hear the universe and she says it doesn't matter~~

He knew Talon, just as he knew Overwatch. It was a name spoken in fearful tones by his assistants back in The Hague, the looming shadow behind the deaths of many of Siebren's colleagues. Even if one was trying to stay out of global politics, there was much to be feared should they ever find out about revolutionary work or how it could be abused. Neither Overwatch nor it's shadowy nemesis were any strangers to extorting assets to make ends meet by any means necessary. In all rights, trading hands from Russia to Talon should have put the fear of god in him.

Perhaps it would have if the first human contact he had genuinely had in eight years wasn't with a man in a halloween costume and a woman who was _fucking purple_.

He barely remembered the actual escape. One minute he was torn apart between realities, the next he was being shuffled onto a dropship by urgent hands and the song in his mind turned discordant ~~_RELEASE ME_~~ with sharp, jarring notes joined by the staccato percussion of rifle fire. At one point he made the mistake of looking back over his shoulder just in time to see the man in the costume turn into a black cloud, scattering across the ground like ash in the wind before converging into his original humanoid state and blowing a Russian's brains out of the back of her head.

Now, Siebren laid on an examination table, tapping his finger against the cold metal to a tune no one else could hear. He could feel the pinch of another needle taking blood in his free arm but was occupied with watching the ceiling tiles fall away into nothing. The glow of the black hole SET ME FREE cast blue and gold aurora around the room. Despite knowing his face was phasing apart again **hold it together HOLD IT TOGETHER** , his lips curled up in an awestruck smile as the melody played behind his eyes. For a moment, he felt nothing but the sheer grace of the cosmos. The universe sang her sweet song, and he hummed a few notes weakly along with it--as if he could hold a candle to that sound.

"And exactly what has you smiling today, Doctor Kuiper?" A voice dripping with cold slid across the melody and tainted it _TAINTED_ ~~**tainted it**~~ with a discordant sourness. Moira leaned over his face, head cocked to the side like a curious bird. "As I recall, the blood tests are your least favorite."

O'Deorain. He felt his smile vanish as quickly as it had come. He remembered her from before, from a scientists' summit being held in Prague. The sound of her voice always made his skin crawl ~~get away from me~~ , and not without good reason. Evidently the horror show of talent in this agency--the "Reaper" and "Widowmaker" as he would know them later--were her masterpieces. Which made perfect sense with what he remembered from that summit; she was always leering at the less humane and conventional experiments with an unabashed hunger and making her partner (a small, pretty blonde woman) look increasingly uncomfortable with every obtuse question asked.

"What would you care, you odious snake?" Siebren scowled

That won a dry chuckle and a smirk. "That's a new one. Feeling creative today, are we?"

"Just take your damn samples. I have work to do, and you're wasting my time." He felt the needle slide out of his arm and sat up, grabbing gauze off the surgical tray to his left (he felt Moira's eye twitch at that) and pressing it to the puncture wound. "Unless you've solved the riddle of that _stykke lort_ you call a stabilizer, I have calibrations to make."

"Ungrateful," Moira sighed, peeling off the blue nitrile gloves with a snap and tossing them lovelessly into the trash. "Not like I had gratuitous time or options when you got here. The fact that you're this coherent is a miracle of science-- _MY_ science, in fact. But _please_ ," she punctuated this by crossing her legs and resting her chin on her hand, "by all means, keep going with the name-calling. I'd love to hear what you come up with next."

"Sorry, I forget you're more inclined to destabilizing your patients into a gaseous state than you are to coalescing them." The scandalizedhuff from the other doctor fell into perfect harmony with the melody _melody_ **_melody_** and made Siebren's heart sing with a petty pang. He stood up and rolled his shoulders, ignoring the way his left one twitched between realities for a moment. "Don't worry, I'll be happy to share my data with you once I'm finished tidying up your failures."

"Enough. _Out_."

" _Enchante_ , until next time." He scooped up the stability harness from the coat rack in the corner and saw himself out.

He felt snake eyes on his back until the infirmary door slammed behind him, and chuckled, giddy with his little victory. A low whistle came from his right elbow, and he looked down at his chaperone.

"Stuck you on assistant duty, have they?" Siebren cocked an eyebrow.

The woman at his side snorted, patting his arm. "Someone's gotta keep you entertained. Besides, it's not like Akande lets either of us very far off the leash these days." With a gentle push she indicated it was time to start walking and they fell into sync, their pace unhurried. "I don't mind babysitting you, anyway. You're definitely the best thing to happen to this group since we got the gauntlet back."

The older man nodded, ignoring Sombra's blase attitude towards a major heist. "You find me entertaining, hm?"

"I mean," she started, turning to walk backwards. Her eyes were unnaturally blue and sparkling with mischief. "You've got aaaaaaaaaaall the secrets of the universe, you say. I like secrets."

"Ah," he smiled as they started to cross through the base cafeteria, "but you don't like to share them, do you?"

Some of the agents at the tables turned and whispered amongst themselves. Their stares didn't seem to bother Sombra at all--she took one glance in the direction of the loudest group and they all immediately shut up. "Not when I don't get anything out of it. You hold information, you hold all the cards. I just prefer living with a stacked deck in my favor."

Sometimes, he was grateful to be on her good side as she curried her blackmail against the other operatives. Even if their gawking did little more than make him uncomfortable, it was nice to have a friend unafraid to defend his honor.

"So what, then?" The linoleum of the ~~space station~~ base hallways felt cool against Siebren's bare feet. "You just like me for my information, and not for anything else?"

Her pace slowed for a second as she thought about it before whirling on her heel to face forward again. "It's not like the conversation is always sparkling, no. You're interesting to me, I've never seen anything like you. Is that wrong?"

"As if being wrong would stop you, little shadow."

He didn't have to see Sombra's face to know she was smiling. She pushed open one of the double doors leading out of the common area, and held it for him as he ducked through. But as his eyes turned from the curl of her smile to their path, the end of the hallway they just turned down started to crumble and her response fell away with it. Pieces of the floor flaked off and floated past his shoulders, the ceiling began to lift apart to reveal the vast emptiness of the vacuum of space. And the answer--THE Answer, to his life's work, _to all of it_ \--sat floating just out of reach, pulsing gold, and singing ~~singing _singing song_ **song SONG _SONG SONG_**~~

"Uh, Sigma?" Something else began to float between him and the black hole. "You're doing the thing again."

Reality snapped back into place and the roar of the melody vanished back into its usual whisper. Siebren barely had time to grab Sombra from where she had been hovering nearly a meter off the ground. It took him a second to realize she was looking him straight in the eye, still caught in his hands where _he_ now was floating. An awkward beat of silence passed.

And Sombra started to laugh.

" _Dios mio_ , that does NOT happen every day!" Joy bubbled out of every word as he gently set her down to the floor, muttering a quiet apology. "I knew I kept you around for some reason--you're still floating?"

The older man followed Sombra's gaze down at where his long toes still hovered a few centimeters off the ground. "So it would seem."

"Is that... normal?"

He shrugged.

".. Neat."

They continued down the hall in silence, as only Sombra's steps now joined the song that passed through Siebren's ears. His right hand always got a little fuzzy when he floated for more than a few minutes, but he seemed to be building a tolerance the more he did it, he thought, rubbing his glitching wrist subconsciously. If he focused on the gentle piano, the soundtrack to his new life, sometimes it helped to subdue the worst of the side effects. It was a melody he knew intimately but also didn't know, like a forgotten word on the tip of a tongue when you know what it is but you don't _what is that melody what is it_

 _"Hold it together..."_ he muttered, cradling his hand.

"Sigma?"

"Ah." He jerked back into focus. "Yes?"

Sombra was looking at her communicator screen with a sneer. Two messages popped up with a cheerful-sounding _buip_. "Something's come up. Friend stuff. Are you going to be okay if I leave you alone?" She tapped out a short response before she clicked the screen off and looked up apologetically. "Today seems better, but the last time I thought you could handle it, you nearly tore apart the cafeteria."

The sigh that escaped him distorted briefly. "I'm getting better, but it will take time. If you need to go, you go. How long was your shift with me supposed to be?"

She sniffed. "Until Moira recovers from your brilliant insults, or Amelie gets back from her Parisian angst. Whichever comes last."

 ~~why don't they let you go?~~ "I don't think I can cause another singularity before then." He glanced at his right hand, which at the moment had stopped phazing. "I'll be alright."

"You're the best, you know that?" Sombra winked and vanished into a blink of purple light with a curl of her fingers. "Keep singing with the universe or whatever it is you tell yourself."

"The _universe_ sings to _me_ , brat!" Siebren yelled to an empty hallway.

She had brought him as far as his room, at least. The door slid open and he pushed himself through off the doorframe, keeping himself aloft until the edge of his bunk mattress hit his shins. With a breath of relief, he landed on the floor with a soft slap of bare feet on concrete and sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping the harness by his nightstand and sliding his head into his hands.

From one cage, straight into another. Even though his little Shadow kept him good company, and he had his own space to work in, he was still constantly monitored and could hardly take a damn piss without having a sample cup thrust into his hands. The cries at night still went unanswered, even when every cell in his body started to split in two. He wasn't allowed to leave this ugly, tacky compound full of ugly, tacky people with ugly, tacky motives. Talon possessed some of the greatest scientific minds in the world, and what did they want with their power? Dominion over other humans?

Pathetic.

He laid down, stretching himself across the mattress and trying to focus on the feeling of his own physicality. Absently he was aware of his nightstand by his head, and the stack of textbooks that was now beginning to float up off of it. He slapped them back to the surface with more than a little irritation, and realized that in breaking his focus his left foot was starting to divide again. _Hold it together, **hold it together**!_

Extremities were the worst offenders. Siebren had tried keeping a journal of all the times and which locations he started to lose control, but the sheer frequency and perpetual change made his attempts at any kind of a detailed log sisyphean. Rather, he started keeping a day-to-day tally of which parts of him were the worst, and if any large distortions happened ~~like the time he literally split into three separate presences and started screaming and ripping up the building around him~~ , to record what the trigger was. Certainly Talon was making that detailed report. They probably had a whole office of yes-men scrubbing over the CCTV footage from the cameras around the base for every blip. They probably would never let him see their findings.

He sucked in a breath and let it out through his nose. Eight years of being subhuman, and two months of being a terrorist organization's pet. They had promised him a new lab and all the technology he could ask for, but only if he was patient. A carrot on a stick, but to what end? He controlled gravity--or at least was learning to. But for now he was still Sigma, the pet project, the anomaly, the joke.

 _Perhaps I ought to take a page from Sombra's book_ , he thought, rolling over to press his face into his shitty military-issue pillow. _Selfishness may be rewarded, if I can find a way to keep my secrets_. **I sing for you and you alone** _But then, what does it matter if they're secret or not? I am soon to be a master of gravity, I will write the laws! Let them eat up the scraps I leave them, it won't matter. Freedom is an illusion. It's all an illusion._

His head began to phase apart and his fingers dug into his pillow **HOLD IT TOGETHER NO _LET ME GO_ ~~RELEASE ME~~** as he willed it to pass. The rush of blood in his ears became a song that shook the walls of the dimension and Siebren gritted his teeth, all 3 sets of them, as he struggled to converge. _Hold it together, ~~what is that melody?~~_ He tried to push the shift through his body and it went, rolling through his torso and rattling his organs before shaking through his legs and settling back into his foot.

It took a near decade longer than he would have liked, but he was beginning to gain better understanding of his condition and how to control it. The influence over gravity itself would take a few more months, perhaps. At least for now he could tame the phase, sending it wherever he pleased. It was a much needed ability, considering the alternative he spent eight years in.

He snorted, remembering the last time his dick decided to transcend reality while he tried to use the restroom. Where that urine ended up, he may never know.

... That actually was an interesting phenomena. All the times he had wept only to have his tears vanish, the days where he couldn't stop vomiting but only found half or so of the evidence--was it possible to control which dimension he secreted any substances into? Hypothetically, he would never have to use the bathroom again if that were the case, what a wild concept.

Siebren found himself listing off all the different things his body could produce, and any time he could recall it disappearing with a phase shift. Excrement? Back in Moscow, he was certain he had probably shit the bed at least once, but thankfully had no distinct recollection. Urine? Already covered. Sweat? Not so much, but it's hard to actively recall an overwhelming sensation of being sweaty and then suddenly dry. Vomit and saliva? He still had his moments, but he hadn't made any vomit vanish in recent memory. Tears were constant, and he wasn't sure if he was glad they were whisked away rather than felt in catharsis. What else, what else?

There was one liquid untested.

The thought hit Siebren like a freight train: _he had not ejaculated once in over eight years_.

 ~~ **RELEASE ME**~~ _Good lord not now_.

Feeling a full-body flush just thinking about it, he slapped a hand over his eyes and warred with himself on whether or not it needed to be tested. Scientifically speaking, leaving out a major variable for an experiment basically defeated the whole point of experimenting to begin with. On the other hand, perhaps it was appropriate to avoid a "substance" out of modesty. When was the last time he even experienced sexual climax? Probably before he left for the ISS3, when he made love to his partner for what neither of them expected to be the last time.

 _And now, they think I'm dead_. The thought left him bitter. ~~_Let them go._~~

Precisely what now, then, was keeping him from testing this? What a good distraction from the past. Talon probably already had a 3-dimensional scale render of his entire body, and Sombra had certainly accessed the footage at least once, so it's not like that particular shame was a roadblock. He was 61--62 in a few weeks, if he recalled correctly--and while other men his age may have had difficulties with virility, some part of Siebren was certain he did _not_. He lacked a genuinely decent lubricant, but would be lying if he told himself saliva was not a viable substitute.

My god, was he really considering this? He dragged his hand down his face and groaned. He did need to calibrate his stabilizer, after finding more botched calculations from O'Deorain's shoddy workmanship. But he was tired, frustrated, and a little desperate for some kind of new stimuli. However there was also the issue of "motivational material" for lack of a better term. What, was he going to spread his legs and think of the universe? _Sing for me_ No, likely not. Perhaps a memory, then?

He had officially hit the point of no return. It came. It went. His hand was resting on the waistband of his Talon-issue sweatpants, and his face was starting to itch from the redness of his shame.

_Fuck it. I've been asking for release for 8 damn years, so I'll take a play on words._

The bunk blanket still found its way over his body. Some modesty was desired, and it would catch any evidence so it was reasonable. This would be fun to log later--materials used: hand, spit, dick, itchy wool bed covering-Overwatch issue circa 2066.

As his hand brushed below his waistband, he frantically flipped back through his memories, errantly causing the books on his nightstand to drift away again. He had been married to his partner for 30 years, and they were a perfectly healthy couple by his metric. Never fought each other, always had something to teach the other, great sex. It was the kind of relationship anyone would dream of, and they did it all while chasing the answer to their research.

A perfect life, ripped apart.

 _Bad train of thought._ He shifted, rolling onto his stomach and rising onto one knee, pressing his forehead into his arm as he mentally and physically reoriented. _Think, think_.

_There was a time, before they were married--Alvi was a lab tech working across the hall for a separate project from where Siebren was working. They met when he dropped a stack of reference papers and Alvi stopped to help him pick them all up (and perhaps it was memory, perhaps it was just a reflection of now, but Siebren recalled his mouth going completely dry when he brushed hands with the person giving him back a dissertation on Lunar gravity). One thing lead to another, they started to date, and then they spent the rest of their tenure fucking like rabbits at every opportunity._

_Once, Dr. Mikaele had an entire class of collegiates touring the lab while Siebren railed Alvi in the chemical storage. It had been one of their favorite spots_ , he remembered fondly, _and they were always careful to keep the passion right under the chemical burn shower, just in case. It took incredible fortitude to keep a straight face when Mikaele later found their stashed jar of coconut oil and inquired about it to the entire lab, which turned out to be in vain because his parting gift from the lab ended up being a jar of coconut oil with a note that read "we knew". Alvi nearly died from embarrassment._

_But it was all in good fun, when I had them pressed against the wall with my fingers in their mouth and my dick in their ass, trying to keep them quiet when there's an entire herd of college kids right on the other side of the wall and we could be caught any second if we make a sound--_

Siebren made several discoveries upon climax.

  1. The sensation of sexual release caused a lapse in gravity control, causing him to levitate approximately half a meter off the bed.
  2. It also caused him to, head to toe, experience a phase shift into at least 4 separate presences, a new high.
  3. He still enjoyed exhibitionism, remembering the camera in the ceiling of his room.
  4. His ejaculate did, in fact, disappear.
  5. Floating off the bed while masturbating in a face-down position and then suddenly dropping a half-meter back onto the mattress is extremely unpleasant.



Rubbing his head after the impact, he grudgingly huffed and slid off the bunk to pick up his textbooks from where they lay strewn across the floor. Sometime in his excitement, the resulting flux had knocked over the nightstand, moved his harness about 2 meters towards the door, and had managed to stick one of his pencils to the ceiling where it now hung from it's point (he would retrieve it later). Meandering over to the small desk set against his room wall, he selected a pen and legal pad to quickly jot down the details of his "experiment"--as well as the fact that post-climax, he did not experience another involuntary gravity event for over 63 minutes. Where the frantic voice begging for freedom usually spat it's venom, now it was a contented, quiet train of thought. The piano melody still played in the back of his mind, as it always would--as he finished his notes and settled back into bed, he could almost pretend it was Alvi's fingers drifting across the keys.

Just as he started to close his eyes, his communicator lit up.

\-----

New conversation with [SOMBRA#1337H4X] + [NEWUSER#9210E72]

SOMBRA: Please remind me never to check your camera feed without checking audio only first.

SOMBRA: I can't unsee that.

NEWUSER: then mind ur own bzness [read 9:47 PM]

-SOMBRA changed your username to LIGMA-

SOMBRA: Wow

LIGMA: sigma [read 9:52 PM]

SOMBRA: No, it's Ligma

LIGMA: nuts [read 9:53 PM]

SOMBRA: >:U

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't like writing sex scenes about 62 year old men but FIRST, BITCH
> 
> Alvi is intentionally genderless! We don't know a lot about Sig yet, and I wanted this to be fluid concerning his preferences. HC Sigma how you like.


End file.
